Emotions in Our Town Thornton

Emotions in Our Town

Thornton Wilder's iconic play Our Town works on several different levels, and understanding these levels is critical to understanding the point of the play. On one level, Our Town is the story of the people in a town and the changes that they undergo at the time. On a second level, Our Town is the story of a town and how it changes over time because of changes in its inhabitants. On a third level, Our Town is the story of the changes, or at least the perceived changes, in American society over the course of the time period covered in the play. When one looks at all three of these levels, it becomes clear that the graveyard scene, in which the stage manager gives an extended soliliquey to the audience, is speaking not only of the death of human beings, but also of the death of ideals, and how that type of transformation takes place. While this scene is powerful in most renditions of Our Town, it becomes even more powerful in the movie, where the iconic stage manager character is played by Paul Newman, himself an icon in American theater. The juxtaposition of that iconic actor with that iconic character highlights the message of Act III, which is that all things die, but that there is something eternal that survives even the most tragic of deaths. This truth remains, whether the death refers to the death of a loved one, such as Emily's death, the death of a town, such as the slow death the audience witnesses of Grover's Corner, or the death of an era, such as the death of the idealize America that is portrayed at the beginning of the play.

The plot of Our Town is basically uncomplicated, which actually differed from much of American theater at that time, which frequently featured convoluted plots with significant amounts of intrigue. This sparse plot is highlighted by the staging instructions, which call for minimal props and sets. What is most fascinating about the movie version of Our Town is that it really strives to capture the feeling of the play. The movie does not feature elaborate sets or plots. Instead, it is as close to a film version of the play as one could imagine. For an audience used to seeing elaborate sets, props, and special effects, this setting might seem distracting, especially because movie adaptations of plays are generally expected to have more elaborate props and scenery than stage productions. Other filmed versions of Our Town have featured more elaborate scenery, just as some stage producers have decided to forego the staging instructions and actually provide the play with more staging. The fact that this movie chose to go with the sparseness of the play relates directly to the Stage Manager's opening soliliquey in Act III. While that will be discussed more in-depth later in this paper, the message talks about the idea of eternity and dismisses the idea that things can be eternal. How could a producer makes this idea more clear than to stage a production in which things are non-existent? Props are absent, but the story is eternal. Therefore, even this decision is pivotal to the telling of the story.

The story opens in May 1901 in Grover's Corners, a New Hampshire town, though it could happen almost anywhere in the United States at that time, as long as the inhabitants of that town were primarily white. The play begins with the routine events of the day, the milkman and paperboy making their deliveries, a doctor delivering babies, housewives making breakfast, and children going off to school. It is meant to be a picture of everyday life in America, and the characters act out this everyday life in typical fashion. However, the stage manager, who could be seen as the omniscient narrator of the tale, can pull people out of their everyday routines. For example, the stage manager asks certain townspeople to come to the stage, where they speak to the audience and even answer questions from actors posed as audience members. In the midst of the everyday routine, the audience meets George Gibbs and Emily Webb, next door neighbors who have a crush on each other. George and Emily represent themselves, but they also represent the idea of American youth; next door neighbors who fall in love with each other, having spent all of their lives together.

The next act opens on George and Emily's wedding day. However, the scene contains a flashback to the kids' last year of high school, where George has become a high school star because of his baseball playing and being class president, and Emily accusses him of becoming stuck up. This altercation leads the two of them to confess their affection for one another, and George decides to stay home in Grover's Corner rather than going away to school. The flashback ends and the characters are married, bringing the audience into their marriage as if guests at a wedding. This scene is interesting, because it shows conflict in growth. George has attained some measure of fame and greatness through his actions, even if that fame is limited to his small town, but he is not encouraged to pursue that behavior. Instead, Emily believes that he has allowed the accolades to change him as a person. Emily very strongly resists that change, and, she is able to convince George to do so as well. He foregoes the future that he has planned for himself and stays in Grover's Corner to marry Emily. In one way, George's staying seems to forestall the town's dying, but, between George and Emily, one sees that George has only delayed his own removal from the vitality of life.

Act III begins about a decade after George and Emily have married, which would place the young people in their late 20s. Instead of a happy home bustling with children and the possibility of a long and fruitful life together, Emily has died in childbirth, leaving George widowed and stricken. The focus of Act III is not on the living inhabitants of the town, but on the dead people in the cemetery. The dead speak, though they do so with an almost clinical detachment from the work of the living. Emily, newly dead, does not have this detachment from the living. She misses life and wants to go back and relive moments of it, convinced that she can recapture the vitality she had when she was alive. Here, the ominiscent and seemingly omnipotent stage manager becomes helpful, because he allows Emily to go back into the past. She relives moments from her past, basically taking the audience back to the beginning of the story, when she was twelve years old, before her marriage to George. She sees the everyday events of the life of the town and has a renewed appreciation for them, most especially for the mundane actions her parents took to make her life better. However, while Emily can appreciate the living and the minutia of their everyday lives, she cannot actually rejoin them. Instead, she is relegated to the status of an observer, which makes her quite unhappy and dissatisfied. Instead of staying to watch the people, she makes the decision to return to the cemetery and join with the dead, instead of questing after life. However, George, still among the living, is seen to be copiously grieving Emily's loss.

Looking at the play at three different levels, it is clear that the third act is meant to discuss death and dying, because it focuses on the death of a main character and reveals the death of the town. Obviously, the events of Act II speak specifically about Emily's death. Emily dies in childbirth and is quite literally no longer part of the inhabitants of Grover's Corner. When she longs to return to life, she cannot. Instead, she can observe life, even her life, but she can no longer be a participant in it. She is shut out of human existence, and learning that, she learns the lesson that the other inhabitants of the cemetery tried to share with her, which is that trying to be among the living is painful for someone who has died. The play makes it clear that it is impossible for Emily to live once she had died. She then decides to step away from life and spend the rest of her time in the cemetery, with its other dead inhabitants.

However, while the play focuses on Emily's physical death, it would be incorrect to label Act III as pessimistic. The Stage Manager gives a lengthy speech in the beginning of the act, setting the stage for the action that is about to transpire. He says:

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being (Wilder, p.68).

Looking at what happens in Act III with reference to that quotation, it is clear that Wilder is trying to say that something about Emily lives on in the town. It is not Emily. By having the Stage Manager offer to take her back to life and demonstrating that Emily literally cannot return to the world of the living, Wilder explodes the idea that Emily can return to the living. He makes it clear that death does mean the end of something. However, it is important to realize that Wilder's play does show some type of life in the cemetery. The cemetery's inhabitants may not be engaging in the world in the same way as the living; instead, they are very clearly detached from what is going on in the outside world, but that does not mean that they are no longer operating in some manner. Emily has ceased to exist on one plane of existence; she can no longer affect things that are occurring in real time in Grover's Corner. However, Emily has continued to exist on another plane of existence. The play closes with her watching the stars come out over Grover's Corner, not with her simply ceasing to exist, closed up in a box. Obviously, that is a strong message about the possibility of eternal life.

However, the existence of a soul or something else eternal in an actual human being is not Wilder's sole message in this play. The play is also a study of the town itself and how it has changed over time, but despite those changes, how something in the town remains eternal as well. The Stage Manager mentions the changes to the town in his soliloquy at the beginning of Act III. He discusses the fact that the residents are no longer the trusting people that they were at the beginning of the story. He talks about things like robberies and the fact that people no longer leave their doors unlocked, even though no one in the town has actually been the victim of a robbery, yet. Instead, he talks about how the spirit of the town has started to change. However, while the spirit of the town has changed, so many of the people are playing the same roles that they once played. Moreover, while people are locking their doors at night and growing wary of one another, they come together to support each other when Emily dies.

Emily's funeral helps highlight some of the changes in the town. Many of the town's residents have remained the same, and, on a surface level, some things have remained unchanged. The very fact that George and Emily married, which kept George from leaving Grover's Corner to pursue an education, is a testament to some things staying the same. However, at Emily's funeral, the audience is introduced to some of the people who have left Grover's Corner and to the idea that the very nature of the town has changed. No longer are people expected to stay in one place from birth until death. Instead, people are becoming transient and towns are changing. Here, the Stage Manager's remarks about the robberies begin to make more sense. When the only people in a town are people who have known each other from birth onwards, then one would not expect robberies and other crimes. Instead, the town has the feeling of an extended family. In fact, this family-feeling is very clear at the beginning of the play. While the town's inhabitants all have their own individual morning routines, the audience sees how those routines interact with one another, and how the town is a cohesive unit, not simply a collection of households.

By Act III, one can see the beginnings of the death of the town, despite the fact that Grover's Corner still has a substantial population and is certainly not a ghost town. In fact, it is not so much that Grover's Corner is dying, at that point, but that it is no longer growing and thriving, and that, once a town stops growing and thriving, it is only a small step before that town begins to die. Emily is gone, but Emily is not the only casualty. Children grow up and move away from Grover's Corner. Though not explicitly stated, it seems clear that some of the traditional roles in town will no longer be filled, because children are not growing up to take over what their parents once did. The vitality of the town is changing. How much clear could this be than by looking at the change in setting? The play begins by looking at young love, but Act III is set in a cemetery. The Stage Manager, who was once talking about young love and the minute details of daily life in the small town, is talking about the idea of eternity and how something can last. His speech even speaks to the idea that the town will die. When discussing the idea that some things are eternal, the Stage Manager makes it clear that buildings and names and other physical things are not eternal. He even denies the eternity of the stars. This speech makes it clear that a town is not going to be eternal. Yet, it leaves itself open to the possibility that something about the town, even if not the town itself can be eternal. After all, why talk of eternity at all if everything discussed in that same soliloquy is shown to die?

While the town itself is actually dying, it is important to recognize that, just as Emily signifies more than a single human being, Grover's Corner signifies more than simply a small town in America. With its absence of props, it can be difficult to place a time or a fixed place for the story that occurs in Our Town, though it is clear that the story begins sometime around the turn of the 19th century. This is a conscious choice. Props help people place time and place, so that a story without props becomes more applicable to everyone in the audience. A prop-less story that talks about death becomes even more applicable, since every person in an audience is going to eventually confront his or her own death. This means that the story can speak to everyone. The Stage Manager's words about eternity then become personal; he is telling the audience that not only is there something about Emily and about Grover's Corner that is eternal, but there is something about you that is eternal as well. This is relevant, even though the play makes it clear that what is eternal about Emily is not her life, or even the impact that she, as an individual, had on any single person or on the town as a whole.

Looking at the story from the third angle, as the story of America, it becomes apparent that Wilder is discussing the idea of America as eternal as well. The story does not focus on the history of what was actually going on in America at that time, and, in fact, in Act III, the Stage Manager gives little indication as to what may be occurring in the outside world, though there are some hints to outside events revealed in the actions taken by some of the play's characters. However, despite these hints, an uninformed observer may not understand how the story of Our Town is the story of America in transition. However, it is almost impossible to miss that message when watching the play if someone has any knowledge of American history. America, at that time, was, for many Americans, an idealized setting. In small towns, people could leave their doors unlocked, trust their neighbors, and expect to raise their families in a single location.

However, America went through a major social upheaval during the course of what is Emily's life. A later audience realizes that the changes one sees in Grover's Corner by the end of the play are miniscule when compared to the changes facing Americans in the decades after the play. After all, Grover's Corner, which seemed to be dying during the play, has yet to be hit by the Great Depression or the impact of the Second World War. These things are coming, and the modern audience is aware of these changes. The modern audience is also aware that there is no way that the coming social upheaval is going to leave Grover's Corner unscathed. The town will be impacted by those social changes, and, even though there is going to be a lot of positive advances that come along with those changes, the idealization of small town America is no longer going to be possible after that point.